Having posted a comment only an hour or two i have just received the following message from Google Webmaster Tools.

Could I be one of the first to have received this e-mail?

We've detected that some of the links pointing to your site are using techniques outside Google's Webmaster Guidelines. We don't want to put any trust in links that are artificial or unnatural. We recommend removing any unnatural links to your site. However, we do realize that some links are outside of your control. As a result, for this specific incident we are taking very targeted action on the unnatural links instead of your site as a whole. If you are able to remove any of the links, please submit a reconsideration request, including the actions that you took. If you have any questions, please visit our Webmaster Help Forum.

This was the classic example of dont check your e-mails just before you go to bed!

Getting the unnatural links message from Google seemed really odd at the time. We have been experiencing an increase in traffic according to webmaster tools, and furthermore we have not done any link building for about 9 months. We have since had no effect on our traffic.Strangely we feel pleased to have received it. We experienced a massive drop in traffic in March but this is the first time we have had a message from Google. We think we were penalized in March but have only just got the e-mail, rather than it being a warning.

This was one of our neglected sites, no after months of fixing all technical SEO issues we are now embarking on good quality content and social media, so fingers crossed.

I'm pretty new to all this and we are embarking on our inhouse SEO campaign due to poor performance from our current SEO company ( after 3 years in position 3-5 for our main keywords we've dropped off to page 2 for all of them in one week ).

I keep being told they are in the process of buying more links. Does this article mean paid for links is bad or just some paid for links?